Yeah, it bugs the shit out of me that we're basically burning down the amazon, and emptying out the aquifers* so a chatbot can hyper-surveil me to make dumb fucking suggestions I will do everything in my power to hide and ignore. And we COULD have spent that money on so many things that are actually socially useful.

Like, I dont mind at all if AI is used to make the world better. Drug discovery, solve some hard maths, shit like that. But it seems like *all* of the money is going on fucking marketing bots.

*And yes I know its a bit more complicated than "burn down the amazon and drain the aquifers". I'm being hyperbolic. Sue me.

This is what bugs me hardest. If some kid pirates one of my albums , he could be facing serious time in a cell with a dude who considers rape his primary hobby. But if some Silicon Valley exec pirates *everyone's* albums, well that's a 400mil bonus and a visit at the Whitehouse. Where's the justice if justice isn't fair?

Sometimes I feel like we're playing chicken with the alien with this AI stuff. Stepping closer and closer to a car vs pedestrian disaster where we aren't the guy in the car. And we're not the one making the choice to jump in front of that car either.

There has been a long running pattern where the think tanks that supply policy to the GOP have seen various sciences as threats to their economic beliefs.

Climate change is a big one. Physics doesn't *care* if the economy is more efficient if we ignore externalities. Cancer doesn't *care* if killing it with chemotherapy might require spending some tax dollars. Covid never cared if social distancing meant that some hours ought be spent away from the office.

Then you've got the religion issue. Christianity, Judaism, Islam etc as a whole has been reasonably effective in the past 100 years of surviving challenges from science by simply acknowledging the science. The catholic church and most "adult" denominations consider evolution just how god did it (Pope John Paul famously advised Steven Hawkings to not enquire before the big bang, because THAT was gods private time lol.) And that whole 6000 years ago thing? Metaphorical or something. But thats not the flavor of christianity thats noisiest in the world of GOP thinktanks. THOSE people see science as a direct threat to their religion because fundamentalism thinks christianity is at threat from science saying "Hey the world is not a 6000 year old flat plane where jesus rode a dinosaur around the place".

Which is a real problem for our children who have to put up with this shit if it starts turning up in their text books.

It's dumb to try to stifle it when it's just developing. For one thing, AI can't take anyone's job. Increasing production has never in history resulted in job loss.

This is ahistorical nonsense and demonstrably untrue. Don't just make shit up to support your arguments.

The introduction of the loom caused massive unemployment in the garment industry. Where I live in Western Australia, mine automation has dramatically reduced the mining workforce whilst increasing production. Improvements in Automotive manufacturing simultaneously increased automotive manufacturing volume whilst simultaneously

And more to the point, AI is causing unemployment amongst young knowledge industry workers RIGHT NOW. This isn't a speculation about the future, its a description of the present.

The economy is not magical. Its governed by the physical circumstances it operates in.

I dont think they where ever in any real danger of having to pay $1.4 tril. They where perfectly capable of keeping this thing in the courts basically forever and win the whole thing by pure attrition. Thats what happens when your company is wealthy enough that laws don't really apply anymore.

But what DID worry them was regulatory and reputational danger. You can beat anything in court if you have inifinite lawyers, but that wont save you if the government just decides to take your toys away and all the customers say "fuck this shit" and close their accounts. $14bil makes that go away. They "lose" but actually win, because it defuses the REAL threat, regulation and catastrophic permanent reputation failure.

macOS doesn't support subpixel font rendering, so text looks pretty bad on 1080p monitors

Apple always had subpixel rendering until pretty recently when it removed it as it can actually make things look worse on high dpi monitors.

Just use betterdisplay to turn it back on if your using a legacy moitor.

*No* model works like you think it does.

A model is just a bunch of of parameters for a giant ness of matrix maths. It isn't even software. Its data.

Its the software that runs it that can, maybe, call home. So just use ollama or whatever.

No she's been interviewed. She's a real person. That isn't controversial. Her identity was confirmed, and thats part of why she resigned, as she did not enjoy her anonymity being lost.

Enterprise software is a horror world of deeply embedded shitshow products that only exist because their claws are so deep in equally shitshow companies that somehow a random piece of software that costs half the IT budget and nobody knows what it does will tank the entire company if removed.

Theres a psychological hook with these dudes that is nefariously hard to correct for.

Theres pretty well documented evidence that peoples voting preferences correlate strongly with certain brain structures and essentially the more fearful you are, the more likely your going to vote right wing. The thing is, the people running the show with the current clown-car administration know this. They know that by constantly creating a climate of fear and uncertainty, with a constant parade of devils and outrages, the more people are going to vote for them.

This is insidious, because the simple act of doing scary shit , start wars, put robocop goons out onto the street to round up immigrants and dissidents, throw people off welfare protections, etc, the more likely they are to vote for that shit. You seen that phenomena of reliably progressive people who suddenly turn into right wing angervoters around Covid? Well yeah, thats the amygdala in action. Covid scary, disease kills. Man on internet said vaccine makes it worse...... Must be the evil immigrants and fauci and the lizard men!

And the worse the country gets, the very fact that its getting worse drives more people to vote for the worse.

Humans vote emotionally, not logically. And its killing us as a species.

Aaaaaand slashdots reader base is flashing bright red keyword flags on the feds snooper-computers lol

Weird corporate goons trying to recover the potentially billions of lost value from losing every vexatious lawsuit they've launched in 20+ years by.... doing more vexatious lawsuits.

Yeah the elephant in the corner of the room was always that SCO never even owned those rights to unix to begin with , it was licensing them from Novell and Novell where *very unhappy* with SCOs antics as the licensing text specifically forbade this sort of nonsense without Novell's go-ahead which they definitely did not give (I assume MicroFocus now have those rights since they swallowed Novell a decade ago. Actually googling it, Microfocus got swallowed by "Open Text". Who the fuck are open text?! Their wikipedia page seems to suggest they've swallowed half of silicon valley, but I havent heard of them before. I'm old :(

I live in australia in a port that used to get a lot of US ships (and marines) visiting, so I spent a fair bit of time propping up bars listening to US marines telling stories about fucked up shit in Iraq and Afghanistan. One thing that surprised me was that literally every single soldier I spoke to told me stories about being super poor and disadvantaged and that the military was their way out of the hood, serve a bunch of years, get some school done, hopefully come out of the other end into a viable career. Note: None of these where officers. I've always presumed the officer class had different career motivations.

But yeah, get out of poverty, get a degree , get a job. I dont think once did I hear one of them say "To defend america" or "To fight for freedom".